The Historical Self

Memory and Religion at Çatalhöyük

Datos Bibliográficos

ID23635157
AutoresJ Wentzel van Huyssteen (autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Páginas109-133
Fecha de publicación2014-02-10
Open AccessSí
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaReligion at Work in a Neolithic Society (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9781107239043.007
OpenAlexW2495277134
ISBN9781107239043
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas7

For a philosophical theologian deeply committed to interdisciplinary discourse with the sciences, the remarkable privilege of being involved in Ian Hodder’s Çatalhöyük project has indeed been enriching as well as an extraordinary challenge. Most importantly, I have learned that archaeology presents us with a very unusual problem of semantic innovation: in looking back to the distant past, how does new meaning come to be, and, in doing so, how does interpretation enable us to reconfigure often long-forgotten meanings of the past? For the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this kind of hermeneutical venture always involved a radically interdisciplinary journey and the long route of multiple hermeneutical detours in direct dialogue with the human sciences, the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology (cf. Ricoeur in Kearney 2004: 124). In these boundary crossings or border exchanges between reasoning strategies, various disciplines transversally connect around shared problems. Therefore, in spite of the fact that the staple of archaeology has always been material culture, interpretations of the archaeological record are also profoundly anchored in the integration of input from other disciplines (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 2010: 167). In the art of deciphering indirect meaning the past is indeed always mediated through an endless process of cultural, political, historical, and scientific interpretations. And it is this kind of hermeneutics that is fundamentally important for any approach to Çatalhöyük and will shape the interdisciplinary epistemology of what we can remember and know about this city.

Ancient Near East History · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Psychology

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